Into The Night (17 page)

She had her two V. Herricks, then; one on Lane Street, one on St. Joseph. Now to make contact.

She decided a spurious phone call, to try to elicit information, was not only impractical, it might even be risky and defeat its own purpose. People do not readily drop their guard, open up their lives, to the voice of a stranger on the telephone. And how could she claim to be anything else? To make an impostor out of herself, pass herself off as somebody he already knew or who already knew him, was out of the question. She didn't know whom to impersonate, in the first place, and the imposture would probably fall flat on its face after the second sentence had been spoken.

A personal visit, a face-to-face confrontation or sizing up, was the only feasible modus operandi.

This much granted, now she was stymied by having to find a plausible excuse. A personal visit, a call, had to have one. She couldn't just go up to his doorbell and ring it.

Additional days went by while she pondered this. Each new idea that came to her seemed fine, the very thing, at first sight. Then as she examined it, flaws would appear, more and more of them. Until it was as full of holes as a fishnet.

More than once, pacing the floor, trailing question marks of cigarette smoke, she would say to herself, "If I were only a man. How much easier that would have made it." She could have passed herself off as a gas-meter inspector, a plumber, an electrician, a telephone repairman, a building inspector. Even rented a bike and borrowed a carton and pretended to be a grocery-store deliveryman who'd rung the wrong bell by mistake. Any number of things like that, just to gain access and size him up, if nothing more. But who ever heard of a girl filling such duties?

And then, as so often happens in this unpredictable world, when she least expected it, and from the quarter it was least likely to have come from, the inspiration was dropped into her lap. Or rather placed in her hand. Ready-made, complete, and practically foolproof.

One night she went down to dinner in the hotel dining room, as she did most nights. But this one night she discovered she'd left her handbag upstairs in the apartment, which she did not do other nights. There was no great predicament involved--the meal was always charged to her bill, and so could the tip be if it had to--except for one thing. Her room key was in the handbag, so she found she'd locked herself out. Here again there was no difficulty, the hotel always kept duplicates at the desk for just such an eventuality.

She therefore stopped at the desk, a thing she rarely had occasion to do, for she never received any mail or messages, and to her surprise the desk man put an unsealed envelope with her name and room number written out on it into her hand.

It was a form appeal for contributions to a multiple-sclerosis fund, and looking up at the mail rack she could see that a similar envelope had been placed in every single letter slot. They all showed evenly white, as though a diagonally slanted blizzard had struck them.

On the back flap, partly printed out and the rest filled in in handwriting, was the notation: "Kindly return this with your contribution to your floor monitor, Mrs. Richard Fairfield, 710."

Madeline had what she'd been looking for, and she recognized it at sight. She took it upstairs with her, let herself in with the emergency key, took twenty-five dollars out of the repossessed handbag, and put it inside the donation form. Then, conceding that it was extremely important for her purposes to get into Mrs. Fairfield's good graces and win her confidence as fully as possible, she added a second twenty-five to the first, making her total contribution a generous and impressive fifty dollars.

She left the envelope unsealed, so there would be the least possible obstacle to Mrs. Fairfield's almost immediate discovery of her munificence, preferably while she was still present. Then she patted her hair a little and went down the hall to 710. She tipped the knocker, and in a moment a strangely composite type of person was standing before her. She was both youthfully old and oldly youthful, a peculiar blend of overage flapper and vivacious dowager. She hadn't jelled right; one hadn't been able to submerge the other. Artfully waved silver-blue hair. Triple ropes of pearls the size of Chiclets, which couldn't have been anything but genuine, they were too large. Some sort of trailing garb with lots of satin and lots of lace. She was even carrying a cigarette in a short jade holder, a thing Madeline hadn't seen anyone do since her own childhood in the fourth Roosevelt Administration. She was completely unlifelike, she seemed to have stepped out of a cartoon in -The New Yorker-. Madeline almost wanted to look down around the floor under her in search of a signature.

"Mrs. Fairfield?" Madeline said smilingly. "I took the liberty of bringing this to you myself, because I--"

"Miss Chalmers," Mrs. Fairfield said, reading the name from the envelope. "How d'do. Very kind of you."

Madeline's strategy had proved well advised. It now paid off handsomely. Mrs. Fairfield had managed to deftly project and compute the bills in the folder without seeming to do so at all, just by a trick of the fingernails, much in the way a practiced card player scans his cards by the merest tips of their corners while he holds them close in to him.

Madeline suddenly found herself high in favor, high beyond mere cordiality, high almost to the point of unbridled enthusiasm. Mrs. Fairfield gave her a dazzling electric smile with teeth that must have cost a fortune. "Won't you come in for a few moments and chat?" she invited.

"If I'm not taking up your time," Madeline said apologetically, but moving forward even as she was saying it.

"I'm expecting my husband to take me to a violin recital," Mrs. Fairfield informed her as they seated themselves, "but he's late. He always seems to be late at times like this." Then she added archly, "Sometimes I wonder about that."

Madeline wasn't interested in the surroundings, she wasn't there for that, so she took no notice of them. But she inescapably received a blurred off-center impression of ornateness all around her, and at least one detail came through clearly: a large oil painting on the wall of Mrs. Fairfield herself, twenty-five years ago. Irreproachably beautiful, but irreparably dated by the peculiar flat hairstyling of the early thirties, always worn with a part far over to the side of the head, the way men wore them. Madeline recognized it from movies she'd seen.

Mrs. Fairfield had seen her gaze up at the wall. "My husband insisted I sit for that," she remarked complacently. Then she went on to explain, rather piquantly, "Not this one. One of the earlier ones. I forget just which."

She wants me to know she's been married more than once, Madeline thought cognizantly. So that it won't fail to point up how attractive to men she once was. Anyone can be married more than once, she reflected. All it takes is a disagreeable disposition.

"I've seen you from a distance once or twice, coming and going," Mrs. Fairfield confided. "I asked everyone, 'Who is that lovely young girl?' No one seemed to know. No one could tell me anything about you--"

"There isn't anything to tell," Madeline murmured.

"--Always alone. Never a young man with you. Why, when I was your age, I could hardly put my foot down without fear of stepping on one of them."

She wants to give me the mental picture that they were always on their knees all around her, groveling.

"They don't interest me too much," Madeline said dryly. "They seem to be always there, a part of the background. I take them for granted."

A look of genuine horror passed fleetingly across Mrs. Fairfield's marshmallow-white face. She promptly dropped the topic, which was what Madeline had wanted in the first place, anyway.

"I don't suppose most people deliver their contributions in person," she said.

"I assume you wanted to be very certain I received it."

"That's only part of the reason," Madeline said. "It struck me that I might be able to do something for the cause besides what cash I can afford to contribute."

"How do you mean?"

"I thought I could solicit donations. I'm sure not every building in the city is fortunate enough to have a volunteer passing out envelopes and collecting contributions. I could go around to other buildings, tell people a little about multiple sclerosis, and see if they'd care to make a donation."

"That's grueling," the woman said. "If you just leave envelopes you never hear from the people again. And if you press for a donation on the spot, you get turned down time after time. All in all, it can be a terrible waste of time."

"It's my time," Madeline said evenly. "I don't mind wasting it, not if it's in a good cause."

"I don't know. I'm not authorized to deputize you as a building representative or anything of the sort--"

"Just give me some literature and contribution envelopes," she suggested. "I don't have to have any official standing. Any contributions I receive I'll hand over directly to you and you can turn them in with whatever else you collect."

The woman thought for a moment. Then, abruptly, she shook her head. "I'll list you as a volunteer," she said. "It may be slightly irregular, but it will be all right."

An hour later, a sheaf of donation envelopes in her purse, she stood on the sidewalk in front of the address listed for V. Herrick, on Lane Street.

It was a frugal little apartment building, no frills or luxuries, somewhat run-down in appearance but still clinging to an overall aspect of respectability. It was of newer vintage than the old walkups of the early 1900s--she could see a self-service elevator no wider than a filing cabinet standing open at the end of the hall-- but it was anything but modern. It probably dated, she surmised, from the immediate pre--Pearl Harbor period, when all such construction was jerry-built, due to the shortage of funds and the low level of rents. It had probably just gotten in under the wire before controls went on, all private building was frozen, and the hordes of war workers came pouring in from all over the country, to beg, bribe, and fight for every square inch of floor space that was to be had. And today--who wanted it?

The Herrick door was indicated as the first one on her left as she entered the ground-floor hall. There was a peculiar vibration such as a riveting machine might make somewhere about, but she couldn't identify what the source of it was. She took out the donation forms, took in a deep but not very heroic breath, and knocked. Nothing happened. She knocked again. Nothing happened again. There was a roaring sound, then it died down again.

She noticed a small push button at the side of the door. It had escaped her until now because some unsung but remarkably conscientious (or remarkably sloppy) painter had painted it over the same sage-green color he'd used on all the rest of the woodwork around it.

She didn't hear any sound when she thumbed it in, but evidently it still worked, because in a matter of not more than a minute or so the door opened, and the torrential tumult of hundreds of shouting voices came banging out at Madeline's eardrums, almost bowling her over by the sheer impact and unexpectedness of it alone. Somewhere in the middle of it all a man was screaming away, as if he were being torn apart by wild horses: "--into the bleachers back of left field! Bob Allen, twentythree! A left-hander from Texas!"

And closer at hand, another man yelped shrilly: "Be-jeezis, don't ever tell me they're no good!"

The woman looking out at Madeline was somewhat slipshod, but had amiability written all over her broad, good-natured face. She had evidently grown used to immeasurable decibels of noise and it no longer had any effect on her placidity. She was holding an orange-pop bottle in one hand and a bottle opener poised in the other. Madeline read the word "Yes?" from her pleasantly upcornered lips.

"Would you be interested in contributing something to the multiple sclerosis fund?" Madeline rattled off. "Any amount you care to give will be appreciated."

"I can't hear you," the woman shouted.

"The multiple sclerosis fund!" Madeline yelled back.

"I still can't hear you!" the woman screeched.

Madeline let her arms sag limply. "I can't yell any louder. I've used up all my voice."

"Wait a minute," the woman said. Or at least lip-formed. She turned her head around. "Vince!"

"Ball one," came back hollowly in answer.

"Vince, I'm talking to you! There's somebody at the door. Tone that thing down a minute, so I can find out what she wants."

This time an injured but stentorian baritone managed to penetrate the sound barrier. "Top of the ninth, five-all, two men on base, and she asks me to tone it down!"

But Madeline didn't wait for any more. She quietly but firmly closed the door again, from the outside, and went away.

It was a basement furnished room, and even as she stepped down from the sidewalk into the enclosed areaway it fronted on, a sense of foreboding overcame her. She even halted a moment and made a half turn as if to get back onto the sidewalk again. Then she overrode her hesitancy and crossed to the arched brownstone doorway set in under the high stoop, and rang. She could hear the faint ring deep inside the house somewhere. If personal risk was going to deter her, she told herself, then she shouldn't have embarked on this odyssey in the first place. There was bound to be risk now and then along the way. Risk was to be expected. There had been risk attached to the Dell Nelson business and she'd come through that all right.

A dim bulb lit up behind the iron-barred basement door, and a man came out.

She didn't like the barred effect the door created between them. It suggested prison, confinement, restraint, something she wasn't able to quite put her finger upon. Danger, that was it. It suggested some sort of latent danger, as if you were facing someone kept apart from you for his own good.

His face wasn't what troubled her. There was nothing in it to suggest malevolence. It had deep lines in it, not the lines of age but of punishing experience. But its overall aspect was a grim stoicism that took what it got, asked no quarter, and sought no retaliation.

He was anything but trim of appearance. He had on a rumpled shirt open at the neck, a pullover sweater that badly needed dry cleaning, and a pair of dingy slacks that needed pressing. He hadn't shaved today, even if he had yesterday. His hair was light brown and tumbled. His eyes were a darker brown, and looked as though they'd seen a lot of things they wished they hadn't.